I'm voting Chomsky as in he is Objective, tho not absolute. What do I mean by that is that Chomsky is dissecting the propaganda and exposing is for what it is, propaganda. That is not to say that US is the ONLY one doing it, EVERYBODY is doing it, in diffent forms. Even those who are say for the moment underdogs, would arguably behave in the same way as the top dog, if they were ABLE to do it.

The only societal form where there was some kind of equilibrium was primitive hunter-gatherer societies where you have "cells" of tribes who operated within confines of the space they needed and were not expansionistic. However that doesn't mean they were peaceful, death, violence and conflict were frequent and common occurences between the bordering tribes. Not much provocation was needed, either, simply the fact that a member of one tribe happened to walk upon hunting party of other tribe in bordering space, he had high chances of getting killed.

Archeological evidence shows that large percentage of skeletons from that era have signs of violence and trauma, fractured and punctured skulls, etc.

What is interesting is that for hunter-gatherers, the equlibrium with the environment was what defined livelyhood.

With emergence of agriculture, the SPACE is livelyhood, and the society form changed from small tribal numbers to larger numbers, nations, states, cities, trade, class distinction, ownership, etc etc. Once you had that paradigm in place, expansionism is a part of it all, and all nations/states have attempted at some point or another so subjugate others and expand, if they deemed they had resources/power to do so.

What Chomsky is criticising is the notion that OTHERS are evil, and WE are always good, the notion which is built up and supported by propaganda, and for whatever reason (maybe hes highly intelligent asperger linguistic) it causes enough cognitive dissonance with Chomsky that he has to expose it. He is also asking the question if peace, justice and democracy is indeed the objective (as it is portrayed by propaganda), then why is US engaging in actions that bring opposite result?

As for the video itself, it is obvious that Buckley cannot keep pace on intellectual level with Chomsky, and he is resorting to attitude, smirks, gestures and cliches.

I only watched the first ten minutes or so. Chomsky is the better debater, but he's also being less intellectually honest. I'll give you two examples:

1. Buckley is talking about the difference between benign versus malicious intervention in the affairs of other states, and Chomsky subtly applies a strawman, artificially constraining the scope of the discussion to examples of colonialism only, then asserts that all examples of colonialism have been malicious. No shit, but that wasn't the question.

That doesn't make him smarter or more correct, it makes him a more street-smart debater.

2. Chomsky then equates self-interested action with oppressive or malicious action. A rational entity always acts in its own self-interest, so there is nothing inherently wrong with doing so. Even when people cooperate or collaborate, they do so out of self-interest. Even when people perform random acts of kindness, they do so to make themselves feel good. Any intelligent man knows this, even Chomsky. But Chomsky plays the populist card of pretending that self-interested action is, by definition, immoral. It's not; it's rational.

There have been many, many cases of interventionism that was not oppressive or exploitative. For example, the U.S. involvement in World War II was not oppressive or exploitative. It was self-interested, in that we didn't want to compete with or face the threat of a militaristic, totalitarian European or Asian super-power, but it was not oppressive, exploitative, colonial, imperialistic, etc. We didn't colonize France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, West Germany, or Japan, nor did we use the opportunity to exploit them. If one were to apply Chomsky's logic to that scenario, the argument would be that U.S. intervention was immoral because a Nazi empire was in the best interests of the European people.

It's the exact same logic he uses, only he uses it to claim that Communism is the best interests of the Korean or Vietnamese or other people.

The truth is that his position is naive, artificial, and logically unsupportable. There are a host of pat arguments that flow easily from the glib tongue of the practiced verbal partisan, and in an oral debate, verbal suppressive fire and sleight of hand is very effective, but that doesn't make him intellectually honest or correct. It might indicate that he's smarter, but it doesn't make him more right or more ethical.

2. Chomsky then equates self-interested action with oppressive or malicious action. A rational entity always acts in its own self-interest, so there is nothing inherently wrong with doing so. Even when people cooperate or collaborate, they do so out of self-interest. Even when people perform random acts of kindness, they do so to make themselves feel good. Any intelligent man knows this, even Chomsky. But Chomsky plays the populist card of pretending that self-interested action is, by definition, immoral. It's not; it's rational.

That is pretty much my understanding as well. What might be called "immoral" in case of US is the propaganda machines insistance that they have moral high ground when they have no more of it than any other empire in history. But I also understand the mechanics of it, it is self interest again, because indoctrination is a part of greater dominion scheme.

Chomsky however is great in my view because he can dismantle the propaganda pretty sharply, and because as being a non-USian, self-interest of US doesn't always correlate to the self interest of the society I live in.

The flipside of that coin is that the fact that Chomsky exists, still has a job and privileges, can speak freely and has been seen in mainstream media in the past is for me the sign of a quality of US. I wish there were people like Chomsky in say, Islamic world, to dissect the paradigm they are surrounded by, but just the idea of it is ridiculous, right? Imagine that.

Chomsky is a valuable and worthy voice, because he questioned the truisms of that age and made people actually think. Anybody who does that is worth having around.

A Muslim equivalent of Chomsky would have been beaten to death in an alley, before gaining any real notoriety. You don't even hear those kinds of things from Muslims in the comparative safety of Western Europe, Scandinavia, or the U.S.

I only watched the first ten minutes or so. Chomsky is the better debater, but he's also being less intellectually honest. I'll give you two examples:

1. Buckley is talking about the difference between benign versus malicious intervention in the affairs of other states, and Chomsky subtly applies a strawman, artificially constraining the scope of the discussion to examples of colonialism only, then asserts that all examples of colonialism have been malicious. No shit, but that wasn't the question.

That doesn't make him smarter or more correct, it makes him a more street-smart debater.

2. Chomsky then equates self-interested action with oppressive or malicious action. A rational entity always acts in its own self-interest, so there is nothing inherently wrong with doing so. Even when people cooperate or collaborate, they do so out of self-interest. Even when people perform random acts of kindness, they do so to make themselves feel good. Any intelligent man knows this, even Chomsky. But Chomsky plays the populist card of pretending that self-interested action is, by definition, immoral. It's not; it's rational.

There have been many, many cases of interventionism that was not oppressive or exploitative. For example, the U.S. involvement in World War II was not oppressive or exploitative. It was self-interested, in that we didn't want to compete with or face the threat of a militaristic, totalitarian European or Asian super-power, but it was not oppressive, exploitative, colonial, imperialistic, etc. We didn't colonize France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, West Germany, or Japan, nor did we use the opportunity to exploit them. If one were to apply Chomsky's logic to that scenario, the argument would be that U.S. intervention was immoral because a Nazi empire was in the best interests of the European people.

It's the exact same logic he uses, only he uses it to claim that Communism is the best interests of the Korean or Vietnamese or other people.

The truth is that his position is naive, artificial, and logically unsupportable. There are a host of pat arguments that flow easily from the glib tongue of the practiced verbal partisan, and in an oral debate, verbal suppressive fire and sleight of hand is very effective, but that doesn't make him intellectually honest or correct. It might indicate that he's smarter, but it doesn't make him more right or more ethical.

I listened to all of it and found myself wanting to hear what Buckley had to say and being annoyed by Chomsky for interrupting him and changing the scope of the debate mid stream. I also came to the conclusion that Chomsky does not understand 'self-interested' because he only applied negative emotions to the concept and never would address why self-interest is immoral and not rational._________________"History began on July 4,1776. Everything before that was a mistake." -Ron Swanson